Helen Burwell Chapin
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Helen Burwell Chapin | |
|---|---|
 Helen Burwell Chapin, wearing a kimono, from a 1927 publication | |
| Born | October 18, 1892 Wayne, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | March 1, 1950 (age 57) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Education | Bryn Mawr College |
| Occupations | Librarian, art historian, art collector, poet, translator |
Helen Burwell Chapin (October 18, 1892 – March 1, 1950) was an American scholar, librarian, art historian, art collector, poet, and translator, who studied and traveled in Japan, China, India, Ceylon, and Korea in the 1920s and 1930s.
Chapin was born in Wayne, Pennsylvania, the daughter of George Walter Chapin and Valeria Jenkins Chapin. Her father was a textile merchant.[1] Initially, she attended the Baldwin School, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College (a private women's college in Pennsylvania) in 1915. She earned a master's degree at Mills College in 1935, and completed doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940.[2] Her dissertation was titled "Toward the Study of the Sword as Dynastic Talisman: The Feng-ch'eng Pair and the Sword of Han Kao Tsu".[3]
Career
Chapin was an editorial assistant at a publishing house in Philadelphia after college. She was working at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when she became interested in East Asian cultures.[4] She went to work at the American consulate in Shanghai in 1924, and traveled around China by bicycle.[5] She moved to Tokyo to work at the 1926 Pan-Pacific Congress. She became more interested in Buddhism, and lived in the Yakushi-ji Temple in Nara for several months. A 1927 publication dubbed her "the first bobbed Buddhist nun in Japan".[6]
Chapin also traveled in Korea, Ceylon and India, visiting sites important to Buddhism, and spent months studying and cataloguing holdings of the British Museum. From 1929 to 1932, she returned to Japan and China on a research fellowship from Swarthmore College, and was granted access to the Shōsōin temple's storehouse of eighth-century artifacts.[7]
In 1932, Chapin was temporary head of the Japanese collection at Columbia University, and worked for the Japanese Society of New York. She was art librarian at Mills College in the mid-1930s.[8][9] During World War II, she worked in the United States Department of Justice as a research analyst,[1] and after the war went to Korea with the United States Army as a monuments specialist.[7]